ON TELEVISION
SAD MEN
Comedy comes of age on TNT.
BY NANCY FRANKLIN
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Braugher, Romano, and Bakula chew the fat in "Men of a Certain Age. "
I t's not the best time to be a middle-aged
man in this country, but it's not a bad
time for television shows about middle-
aged men. This week, comedy comes to
TNT, in the form of "Men of a Certain
Age," an hour-long serious comedy, with-
out a laugh track and with a more relaxed
pace than the bullet-train setups and
punch lines of conventional sitcoms. For
women of a certain age, on the other
hand, the glaring awfulness of "Cougar
Town" stands out as this year's undeserved
slap in the face, though perhaps there's
some rough justice to seeing a forty-year-
old mother as a tornado of insecurity and
sexual mania-not that Courteney Cox
has any believability in the role-after all
the years that men have been portrayed as
lunks, idiots, and TV-watching duds.
(Who even knows if "Cougar Town" has
a laugh track or a soundtrack? If it's there,
it's drowned out by the shows humiliation
92 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 14,2009
track.) This season, ABC has a great show
about men (and women) who are getting
up there, "Modern Family," and a not en-
tirely insulting one, "The Middle," and it
has already cleared away some junk-the
deadly sitcom "Hank," starring the ever
more unwatchably brittle Kelsey Gram-
mer. In general, the creative talents work-
ing in television comedy have been trying
to push upward through the pavement of
convention in order to grow. The touch-
stone for this movement-at least, on
network television-was the one-camera,
no-laugh -track comedy "Arrested Devel-
opment," which débuted on Fox half a
dozen years ago. That series, about a fam-
ily that was living on the fumes of its de-
lusions in an unfinished California hous-
ing development, was farcical and deadpan
at the same time-all the characters, even
the teen-agers, had a touch of middle-
aged craziness. "Arrested Development"
busted open the family sitcom, and just as
important as what it achieved on that level
was its fate in the world. Fox made the
bold decision to equate "good show" with
"worth renewing," and brought it back for
a second season, despite its poor ratings.
The series wasn't brilliant to the end (it
lasted three seasons; two would have been
fine), but that act of support inspired hope
in both viewers and TV writers. (Now
were practically spoiled, as another trea-
sured show, NBC s "Friday Night Lights,"
keeps not getting cancelled.)
"Men of a Certain Age' is bound to at-
tract attention, because its co-creator, and
one of its co-stars, is Ray Romano; what
shouldn't be overlooked, however, is the
fact that the show is also good. Surpris-
ingly good, you might think, especially it:
like me, you were put offby the character
that Romano played in his long-running
(1996-2005) sitcom, "Everybody Loves
Raymond"-a schlubby, whiny husband
whose hallmarks were reluctance and in-
attention. He was a pull toy for Patricia
Heaton's brisk, demanding wife. The
theme song for "Men of a Certain Age,"
a cover version of the Beach Boys' "When
I Grow Up (To Be a Man)," plays over a
montage of old home movies of little boys
doing classic little-boy things and going
through rites of passage: bicycling, run-
ning under the sprinlder, wearing super-
hero capes, teasing girls, throwing mor-
tarboards in the air. The sequence makes
you wonder whether the series' creators-
Romano's co-creator is Mike Royce, a
longtime writer and producer of "Ray-
mond" -will go further than a checldist
of boomer nostalgia. They do. As you get
to know the characters better with each
episode, the credit sequence becomes
increasingly touching, underscoring the
gifts that come with an American child-
hood and the true pains of adulthood.
The last shot is of a boy throwing a
balsa-wood airplane up into the air, and
the joy and momentum-the sense of
aliveness-expressed in the thrust of his
arm as it launches the plane are almost
heartbreaking.
The obvious sitcom take on the image
would be that although you can still throw
a plane at fifty-the age that the charac-
ters in "Men of a Certain Age' are push-
ing-you may tear your rotator cuff But
the show offers more perspective than
that. It's almost as though it had a narra-
w
tor telling you, in a voice-over from the 8